Enter, stage left

Born into a theatrical family, David Edgar took up playwriting at the age of five and later, after a spell in journalism, went on to make his name in 70s agit-prop theatre. Hailed as 'a very English intellectual', he retains his political vision and has now written two dramas about the American elections

The political drift to the right has always been one of the preoccupations of playwright David Edgar. In Maydays, his powerful analysis of political disillusionment, premiered in 1983 at the height of the Thatcher revolution, his apostate anti-hero, Martin Glass, grows tired of the posturing of Communist party politics and, in a moment of right-wing epiphany, sees his entire belief system come crashing down: "You see, I don't think it's just Stalin, or even Lenin. I think it is the whole idea," he wails, "that our childlike sense of justice and compassion and fair play, the thing that got us here, that we must hone and beat it down, from a ploughshare to a sword; that there's no morality except the interests of the revolution..."

In The Shape of the Table (1990), about the collapse of the eastern bloc, his dissident president ends not by ushering in a new era, but with a feeble call to ape western capitalism: "Let's just get back to the normal ordinary way of doing things," he announces in the final act, "the way they do them in the west."

And in his latest work, Continental Divide (2003), which opens at the Barbican theatre in London tonight, we see the socialists drift rightwards and the conservatives slew left, until they meet in the marshy middle ground: "It would be nice to think that this is all because you were real anarchists or even genuine collectivists in your communes and your tribes," argues the ex-socialist, ex-radical candidate, intoxicated by the proximity of real power, "but the truth is more prosaic. You are terrified of winning. You had to be a member of a club that might accept you..."

But while governments have teetered, the eastern bloc crumbled and the Labour party is seen by some to have hijacked many tenets of Thatcherism, Edgar, over a remarkable 30 years, has remained the immovable touchstone of left-wing British political drama.

His plays have remained infused with "the great transformational myths of our age", as he puts it, and have applied his sharp political analysis to some of the thorniest political issues: the rise of the National Front in Destiny (1980), the human consequences of the miners' strike in That Summer (1987), and the disintegration of eastern Europe in The Shape of the Table and Pentecost (1994). And despite the frequent media death-knell heralding the demise of political theatre in Britain, Edgar has enjoyed almost unbroken success, with all of his most important plays produced either by the Royal Shakespeare Company or at the National, while also scoring an international hit with his epic adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby (1980): "I think of David as one of the leading theatre writers around," says Trevor Nunn, who co-directed Nickleby, "though he is probably, as far as audiences are concerned, a little less well known than a playwright such as David Hare, because he has tackled subjects that are less obviously popular. But David [Edgar] certainly belongs in that same category of writers who have held true to their beliefs and who continue to stimulate, to protest, to be brave and to delight."

Combining cabaret, musical hall, social activism and a broad dash of moral absolutism, Edgar began his career in the agit-prop theatre scene of the 1970s with works such as Rent or Caught in the Act (1972), about housing conditions for the working classes, and State of Emergency (1972), an indictment of Edward Heath's Tory government.

His creative breakthrough came with Destiny in 1976, a mature and subtle treatise on British racism, which the Guardian lauded as "a coherent description of potential political Armageddon", followed by Maydays and That Summer, where the political message was finely balanced by powerful characterisation and a wealth of humour. And while other left-wing writers of his generation, such as Trevor Griffiths and Howard Brenton, were demoralised and enervated by the fall of communism in 1989, Edgar rose to the challenge with plays such as Pentecost that explored the ideological vacuum left behind.

With such an overtly political agenda, it is not surprising that Edgar has had his critics, most notably the Guardian's Peter Jenkins, who denounced Destiny for its parallels between the National Front and nazism as "dishonest in the manner which is the specialty of the committed political theatre of the left", and later launched a broadside at Maydays, which he claimed "brings out some of the self-indulgent posturing and masturbatory impotence of revolutionary politics in Britain as practised by the Trots of the 1970s".

Edgar has always been eager to counter charges of "isolationism" and "impotence" less with words than actions and has always been deeply involved in practical projects, such as the Theatre Writers' Union, which he founded in the 1970s to counterbalance the rise of the autocratic director, and the playwrights' course at the University of Birmingham, which has seen more than 200 young playwrights pass through its doors since 1989. Others counter that the passion and wit in Edgar's writing give it the inexorable power to move and perhaps even change audiences: "He has tackled subjects that bewilder, puzzle and fascinate him," says Michael Attenborough, who directed Pentecost and The Prisoner's Dilemma (2001), "so that the process of writing the play is part of the process of sorting things out for himself. You don't feel patronised or hectored."

At over 6ft, with large prism-like glasses and a professorial demeanour, Edgar can make a rather awkward first impression: "He can occasionally, just because of his size and his manner, seem a little ponderous," says his friend, the writer Anthony Holden, "but I think this is just a consequence of a razor-sharp brain and a massive intelligence. It can be a little daunting if you're not prepared."

Once this exterior melts away, however, he relaxes into a lively and entertaining conversationalist, whose jokes and aphorisms are as polished and rehearsed as his political positions: "Both spiritually and visually," says Mike Newell, who directed the TV adaptation of Destiny and is now a friend, "David is what people think an English intellectual ought to look like - the balding domed forehead and the google eyes and the 'Gosh, isn't it extraordinary' manner. But at the same time, he is very funny, fantastically savvy and very practical and he loves the business of getting things on in the theatre."

All these qualities are in his work, lit from within by an idealistic political vision that has burned brightly since his days as a student agitator. He laments the fact that socialism "has become the dream of the past", and seeks in the work to "recreate a sense of adventure for the left". The collapse of communism, he believes, has unjustly wiped away all the decades of achievement by left-leaning activists in every social sphere: "I think what the 90s and the naughts have done, by turning identity politics into lifestyle, is to detach that from the Marxist politics and move it into the realm of individual choice. But those individual choices wouldn't have been possible without the past. I mean Graham Norton wouldn't have been possible without Stonewall. The Spice Girls wouldn't have been possible without Germaine Greer. And those victories were political. Those things came out of politics and I think we can't forget that."

Though he was never a member of the Communist party, and never shared any of his peers' romantic notions about the communist east, Edgar still maintains that Marx is a vital tool for social and political analysis: "Am I still a Marxist revolutionary? No, I'm not. Do I still believe in the egalitarian agenda? Yes, I do. The great thing Marxism did was it said 'this is connected to this is connected to this'. It isn't just about you. It's about you and somebody else. And I think that is still an important way of looking at the world."

Edgar was born in Birmingham on February 26 1948 into one of the city's long-standing theatrical families. His father, Barrie, was an actor and stage manager at the Birmingham Rep and became a television producer, whose credits in-cluded Come Dancing and Songs of Praise; his mother Joan (née Burman) was an actress and radio announcer, whose voice became familiar to millions during the second world war; his aunt Nancy Burman was a theatre administrator, who ran the Birmingham Rep throughout the 60s and 70s, and his maternal grandmother was the character actress Isabel Thornton, beloved for her performances as the nurse in Romeo and Juliet and in The Farmer's Wife, a 1930s family comedy.

"Our Dad built a theatre in the back garden for David," remembers Edgar's sister Kate. "It was basically a very up-market garden shed, but it seated 12 people and had a stage which was about eight inches high and a fully functional lighting system and tabs which were the old red curtains passed off from the Birmingham rep. My dad took great pride in building the sets and my mother made costumes."

Edgar began writing plays for the "theatre in the shed" at five and, by nine, had written his first full-scale work, the grandiosely titled "Life and Times of William Shakespeare": "At this stage, the idea of being a playwright who would write large parts for other people had not entered my consciousness," he recalls. "I wanted to be an actor. I wrote the 'Life and Times' for the sole purpose of playing Shakespeare's lead actor Richard Burbidge."

At Oundle public school near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, Edgar threw himself into school productions: "He had shown such flair in school theatricals," remembers Holden, "that he was the first boy in the 300-and-something-year history of the school to be allowed to direct a play. He chose Mother Courage by Brecht. It was an all-male school, and I was among those who auditioned for the role of Mother Courage, but guess who wound up playing her? David Edgar!"

He was soon to abandon his dreams of a career as an actor after a little tactful maternal advice: "I was playing Miss Prism in a school production of The Importance of Being Earnest," Edgar recalls. "I had to wear these slightly high-heeled shoes. I was fine when I was stationary, but as soon as I had to move, the performance fell apart. Afterwards, my mother said: 'It's not going to be acting, is it dear?'"

Shifting his ambitions to playwriting, Edgar decided to read drama at Manchester: "It was a very exciting place to be at that time," he remembers, "and there was a lot of political activity in 1968-69." As editor of the college newspaper, the Independent, Edgar was particularly poised to soak up some of the revolutionary atmosphere that was sweeping the campus and went through a period of rapid left-wing politicisation, protesting against the Vietnam war as well as organising campaigns against exams in the university: "We nearly had a strike over it," he recalls, gleefully. "On the last day we were producing a two-sided leaflet on a Roneo printing machine in my bathroom. But the electrical element broke so we had to do it by hand. It was 40,000 turns, and there were half a dozen of us. We were doing it in 20-minute shifts. There was a wonderful sense of community endeavour and achievement. It was one of the happiest nights of my life."

After graduation, Edgar decided to try journalism and landed a position, just over the Pennines, at the Bradford Telegraph and Argus. Olivia James, who had arrived just two weeks previously, recalls: "Even at 21, he was very distinctive. He was much as he is now: owlish, plump, tall, kind of academic-looking and always wore a Dr Who scarf and a big tweed overcoat. He was never anything other than middle-class, rather posh and learned by Bradford standards. But he really managed to make everybody like him, and he did it just by being himself." Edgar particularly relished the hard news aspect of his new job: "For a very short period I was a 'cutting-edge' investigative journalist," he says, "working on the Poulson affair, which was one of the local government scandals du jour."

However, his real forte lay in covering university affairs and reviewing local theatre productions as the paper's second string critic. In this capacity he came into contact with local theatre firebrand Chris Parr, a director who had nurtured the early careers of such writers as Howard Brenton and Jeff Nuttall. Parr commissioned Edgar's first professionally performed play, a rather bizarre and somewhat convoluted encounter between Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe, Two Kinds of Angels (1970): "There was a fashion at the time to take two very unlikely historical figures and to put them in the same room," says Edgar, before admitting: "It's not a very good play."

Angels, however, served as Edgar's introduction into Bradford's burgeoning fringe scene, which included groups such as the iconoclastic John Bull Puncture Repair Kit and Welfare State. Edgar was co-founder of an agit-prop group called the General Will, which mounted most of his early political works, including The National Interest (1971), an indictment of the Heath government featuring confrontations between "de Tory gang" and "de Labour gang", Rent, in which a family, less than subtly named the Harddonebys, are subjected to the injustices of the housing finance act of 1971, and The Dunkirk Spirit (1974) a chronicle of British capitalism since the war. The style was crude and cartoonish, with lavish helpings of burlesque and music hall: "We performed outside theatre buildings, sought out working-class audiences," says Edgar. The General Will began to disintegrate when the only gay member went on strike in mid-performance due to the overwhelming heterosexual slant of the company's material.

In many ways, the demise of the General Will released Edgar to concentrate on the first of his mature works: Destiny, which was produced by the RSC at the Other Place in Stratford in 1976, transferring to the Aldwych the next year. The play follows an ex-soldier named Turner released back into civilian life after the independence of India in 1947 only to see his livelihood decimated by property speculators and his political ambitions in the Conservative party thwarted by a candidate running on a "modernisation" ticket. In the end, Turner feels his only option is the Nation Forward party, a thinly veiled reference to the National Front: "I started writing Destiny when the National Front got 16% in the West Bromwich by-election in 1973," says Edgar. Some critics, such as Jenkins, upbraided Edgar for making broad comparisons with German fascism and others, he recalls, "attacked [the play] for giving the devil the best tunes, for promoting what it was trying to analyse". But most saw Destiny as an important, considered work: "The final effect is of a play that is something more than skilful and well-written," concluded Michael Billington in the Guardian. "It is one that is actually necessary."

Around this time, Edgar, with his girlfriend Eve Brook, a feminist and social activist whom he had met in Bradford and married in 1979, moved back to Birmingham, returning home as one of the country's most fêted young playwrights. After Destiny, adapted for television in 1978, Edgar returned to his roots for Wreckers (1977), about dockers, written for John McGrath's 7:84 company, and then went on to produce two adaptations: The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1978), about the South African dissident lawyer, and Mary Barnes (1978), which dealt with RD Laing's theories of psychiatry. At the end of the decade, as part of an exchange programme, Edgar spent a year in the US "on a wonderfully wide brief", working first at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York and then taking a research road-trip across the continent.

Towards the end of this, Nunn invited Edgar to collaborate on what remains his most successful work: the stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby: "Initially I wanted to adapt a novel by George Eliot called Felix Holt the Radical," remembers Nunn, "and I talked to David because he was a political writer who I thought would go very well with that subject matter. By the time the project came to fruition, it had transformed into Nicholas Nickleby, and the reasons for involving David in the first place had really disappeared. But I still thought he was just the person I was looking for." What Edgar had initially considered as "a little re-entry project" suddenly ballooned into an undertaking that would dominate his life for the next two years. When it premiered in 1980, Edgar was praised for highlighting the social conditions of 1830s England while never dimin ishing the melodramatic exuberance of the Dickens original. The production went on to win three Olivier awards, including Best New Play, and a Tony.

After Nickleby, Edgar was eager to return to a more overtly political theme, and chose the failings of the socialist left and the political turncoat in Maydays (1983). "What the play argued," says Edgar, "was that one of the reasons the right was so heartless and Manichean in the early 80s was because much of its culture was created by people who had lost belief in the ends but kept the means." Through its central character, Martin Glass, Edgar was able both to explore his own past as an activist and possible fantasy futures as a sceptic and reactionary: "I tried his defection out on myself. I asked myself: What would drive you to suddenly say: 'Bugger it! I'm going to go back to the instincts of my class and become a Tory.' In part, that was a personal experiment to stop it happening and thus far it's been successful."

Though Maydays did relatively well, it remains under-performed. Edgar followed it up with a much more intimate play, That Summer, about a journey he took during the 1984 miners' strike with the daughters of two mining families. Attempts to write for television faltered and a film, a Gothic weepie called Lady Jane, with Nunn directing, did miserably. By the end of the 80s, it seemed that even Edgar had given up on his faltering career and was more interested in pouring his energies into the Birmingham University playwriting course, which he set up in 1989: "It was a slightly dispiriting period, and I think that starting the course was certainly re-energising."

The collapse of communism should really have been the final nail - just as it was for fellow left-wing playwrights, many of whom stopped writing - but instead Edgar rose to the challenge and a rich new vein of material: "I had never been a communist and I never felt that the Soviet Union was my team," says Edgar. "But on the other hand I did feel in the 80s increasingly that you couldn't just blame it all on a historical mistake. When the wall came down, I did feel it was the death of ideals that I had a relationship with and I felt that I should write about it."

The Shape of the Table, which premiered in November 1990, the first anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, explores the transfer of power in a former communist state from the old political commissars to the dissidents they have been oppressing. The action never ventures beyond the poli-tical bartering of the meeting hall, giving the play a claustrophobic, backroom feel. Most important, rather than simply lifting his plot from the tumultuous events of 1989, Edgar combined elements and characters from various post-Soviet eastern bloc revolutions, focusing less on events than on the mechanisms beneath: "I tried to invent a kind of model east European revolution. The issues are: how do you cope with losing a lot of power? How do you come to terms with gaining a lot of power? And what if that power is vitally connected with an ideology you've lived your life by?"

Shortly after the premiere of Shape, Edgar visited Prague for the first time: "When I was there, I went to a church that was being restored, and there I had the idea: what if they found something, a lost work of art, perhaps, behind the wall?" This thought would soon blossom into the fresco that forms the centrepiece of Pentecost, premiered at the RSC in 1994. Set in an undisclosed east European country, it begins as a kind of art-historical whodunnit in which three specialists try to trace the lineage of the newly discovered fresco.

Half way through it is transformed into a political hostage drama, when a group of refugees seizes the church: "This part of the plot arose when I asked people what they were most frightened of. And I thought they would answer: 'Losing my apartment'. But they said: 'Our big fear is seven million Russians moving west.'" The end result is a play far more poetic, symbolic and complex than anything Edgar had written before: "The first serious response in British theatre to the tragedy of Sarajevo," concluded Michael Coveney in the Observer.

In 1997, Edgar's personal life suffered a tragic upheaval, when his wife, just 52, was diagnosed with inoperable lung and throat cancer. After her death the following year, Edgar adapted a detective novel she had written but never published for radio: "As a memorial it was a good thing to do," he says. Edgar's present partner is a former student of the Birmingham course, a 30-year-old playwright, Stephanie Dale, who writes for radio and runs a theatre-in-education company. "Living with a younger writer is very dangerous in the long term," he comments, "in the sense that one day she'll be getting work put on at the National while I am writing rude letters to directors asking why they won't do my plays."

Such an eventuality seems some way off. In 2001, the RSC premiered the last instalment of Edgar's east European trilogy, The Prisoner's Dilemma, another backroom exploration, this time of Dayton-style peace negotiations. And, perhaps tempting fate, Edgar's latest project Continental Divide is a six-hour, two-play cycle - Mothers Against and Daughters of the Revolution - centring on an American election campaign with a cast of almost 40 characters drawn from various political creeds and colours. It was first staged at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last year: "Can you imagine the sheer guts to go across to America to write two plays about American politics?" marvels Attenborough. "I can't think of a single other English writer who would have the gall to pull it off."

Some time soon, after almost two decades of plays set in foreign countries, Edgar promises to return creatively to England: "Hare has already bagged the Iraq war," he says, "but I may look at the more domestic failures of the Blair government." However, the day when Edgar produces a tidy, well-made, apolitical personal play, may be some way off: "It would be very nice to write a five-hander some time," he concludes. "And because of the events of the last 10 years of my personal life there are things bubbling away that I might like to write about. But of course, the kinds of themes and ideas I'm drawn to never quite seem to fit into that. I don't think the project of trying to write about the contemporary reality will ever run its course. It continues to be important to look at a mysterious and dangerous world, and to try to make sense of it."